The Occasional Grammarian

Irregular Verb Edition

For those who (yes, really, people are "who," objects are "that") care about such things but may not have learned them (or learned them wrong) in school, I introduce the concept of the irregular verb. I've been hearing more and more people, when speaking in the conditional perfect tense, say, using the past tense of verbs that are irregular, in other words, verbs whose past participle is different from their past tense. For example, "I could have went" instead of "I could have gone," or "She would have came" instead of "She would have come."
   Regular verbs are those whose past participle is the same as its past tense, which is made by adding -ed ~ "play-played," for example, or "open-opened." An irregular verb's past and past participles, by contrast, are different, as in "begin-began-begun" and "speak-spoke-spoken."
   Here is a great chart explaining verb tenses: http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/grammar/tenses_satz.htm
   And here is a simple chart of the past and past participle forms of common regular and irregular verbs: http://www.grammar.cl/Past/Irregular_Verbs_List.htm